Even Apple didn’t want my iPhone 6 Plus

After the big Apple announcement, I internally debated the merits of a mobile phone that would instantly connect me to a lifetime’s worth of entertainment and knowledge, and a slightly larger version of the same thing. I chose the big one. Like so many bad decisions, I made this one at 3AM in my underpants.

“This is huge!” said my wife, snatching the phone. She held the slab to her cheek, as if to make a call, and half her head disappeared behind a wall of space gray. It looked like she’d stolen a prop phone from the set of a 1980s sci-fi movie.

MAKING EXCUSES IS A BAD SIGN IN A NEW RELATIONSHIP

After a minute, bored and distracted by her oldiPhone 5, she tossed the Plus back to me and I caught it like a kitten that’d fallen from a tree, immediately checking every inch for damage. I found no signs of injury to my new phone, and I exhaled.

Throughout the evening, I bounced without warning between two heightened emotional planes:

On one plane, I obsessed over how best not to drop the phone.

Protecting the iPhone 6 Plus from my clumsiness wasn’t a passive activity. Whenever I stretched a thumb to reach a far corner of the screen, the colossal phone would tilt, threatening to drop onto our apartment’s wooden floor. Using the phone and preserving the phone were one and the same.